Optimum Nutrition Creatine 2500 Caps Review — Why Pills?

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Optimum Nutrition is one of the biggest names in the supplement industry and you may already know about their protein powder, Gold Standard Whey, which is probably the most popular whey on the market. They sell a variety of other products as well, including branched chain amino acids and pre-workouts but here we decided to try out their creatine capsules. Let’s take a closer look.

Optimum Nutrition Creatine 2500 Caps Ingredients

The main ingredient is creatine monohydrate, specifically the kind sold by Creapure®. There are no artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors, or preservatives.

The other ingredients are magnesium stearate, which is a flow agent that helps to prevent the creatine from sticking to the machinery in the facility in which it’s made, and gelatin. The gelatin forms the capsules themselves and according to Optimum Nutrition, they’re made from “beef and/or pork,” which may make this product off limits for some users.

Optimum Nutrition Creatine Ingredients

Optimum Nutrition Creatine 2500 Caps Benefits & Effectiveness

The principle ingredient here is creatine monohydrate, which is the most widely researched and studied form of creatine. It’s important to note that it comes from Creapure®, a German facility that’s well known for the quality and purity of their product, which is tested at the German Olympic Training Center.

Optimum Nutrition’s creatine is also made in a facility that’s certified Good Manufacturing Practices, or GMP, which means the facility is subject to rules enforced by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that may help to ensure the purity of the product.

While this product isn’t tested for banned substances by a third party group like Informed Choice, the fact that this is both Creapure and processed in a GMP facility may bring some peace of mind to folks concerned about purity.

Optimum Nutrition Creatine Review

The Takeaway

Optimum Nutrition has delivered, providing a high quality creatine that is likely free of impurities. While some users may find taking 4 pills to reach a 5-gram serving size, others may find the portability to be a bonus: it’s easier to take a fistful of pills with you to the gym or on the road. The gelatin may bother some consumers but for the price, this is a pretty effective and transparent product.

Optimum Nutrition Creatine 2500 Caps

Per Serving: $0.16

7.9

Ingredients

8.0/10

Effectiveness

9.0/10

Price

6.8/10

Pros

Portable

Creapure® creatine

Processed in a GMP facility

Cons

Nick is a content producer and journalist with over seven years’ experience reporting on four continents. His first articles about health were on a cholera outbreak in rural Kenya while he was reporting for a French humanitarian organization. His next writing job was covering the nightlife scene in Shanghai. He’s written on a lot of things.

After Shanghai, he went on to produce a radio documentary about bodybuilding in Australia before finishing his Master’s degrees in Journalism and International Relations and heading to New York City. Here, he’s been writing on health full time for more than five years for outlets like BarBend, Men's Health, VICE, and Popular Science.

No fan of writing in the third person, Nick’s passion for health stems from an interest in self improvement: How do we reach our potential?

Questions like these took him through a lot of different areas of health and fitness like gymnastics, vegetarianism, kettlebell training, fasting, CrossFit, Paleo, and so on, until he realized (or decided) that strength training fit best with the ideas of continuous, measurable self improvement.

At BarBend his writing focuses a little more on nutrition and long-form content with a heaping dose of strength training. His underlying belief is in the middle path: you don’t have to count every calorie and complete every workout in order to benefit from a healthy lifestyle and a stronger body. Plus, big traps are cool.

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